Vlad’n’the’Cloud

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

So yes, I’m alive. I’ve been buried in financials and project planning as we both have some huge announcements this fall as well as stuff that will come down early next year. But more on that later, I’m really writing the post to address the many comments I’ve gotten over the past few days that I can only judge from scrolling through the subject lines.

Yeah, how about that?

Many of you are interested in the commentary that was generated from the last two posts. What amazes me is the magnitude of people that are willing to ask in private but don’t want to comment in public or even on Facebook or Twitter.

I’ve blogged about this a billion times and am not about to make it a billion and one. What your religious belief towards the change and progress of technology happens to be is irrelevant. Over the course of building a business you make investments and hope that new ventures mature faster than the currently mature business lines die off.

Office 365

I don’t really have the time to celebrate Office 365 going down. Everything goes down.

What I find quite surprising is that there are folks out there celebrating this yet another outage as the reason their obsolete business model stands a chance. It doesn’t. You see, every time a client chooses cloud they choose not to buy a server from you which eliminates your highest margin product and your highest project generator.

The adoption of new, more affordable technology will not stop just because it sucks.

I know it defies common sense but the technology evolution to the cloud will not be stopped because of a few outages. I look at some of these hypocritical arguments all the time and about the only thing I can explain them away with is that the folks arguing either have no experience or a very short memory span. It was not that long ago that we dealt with tiny hard drives, BSODs, failing backup jobs, failing antivirus updates that brought the network to a crawl, broken service packs that interrupted services, migration paths so broken they required books worth of hacks to get done and Windows services getting pwned left and right with 0 day exploits.

Your clients made it through all that and they paid a heck of a lot more than a few bucks per user per month.

It’s OK to admit you don’t know how to make money with the cloud or that it’s going to require scale and a different level of marketing and promotion. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it and that’s why we have OnForce and Geek Squad.

Don’t let cynicism and complacency hold you back from taking advantage of the biggest opportunity you have to grow your client base. The days of a few clients making a good paycheck are over, time to get serious and spread your wings.

But what the heck, maybe Apple, Microsoft, HP, Dell and Google are all wrong and the cloud thing will fail. Right now – statistically – that is not what’s happening. Within ExchangeDefender, the cloud is whipping on-premise by a margin of 14-1.

Look at the opportunity this way – if you really like shifting boxes, maybe the cloud offering will introduce you to folks that will need a hardware refresh.